1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to dynamic preloading of web pages.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web is a feature of the Internet, which includes web page servers, for storing web pages and transmitting the information on those web pages on request, and web browsers, for requesting web pages from web page servers and presenting the information on those web pages to operators.
One problem which has arisen in the art is that it can take substantial time to transmit a web page from the web server to the web browser. This problem is particularly acute when the web server has other demands on its processing power, when the web page is laden with data or graphics, or when the communication link between the web server and the web browser has low communication bandwidth. An operator of the web browser perceives substantial transmission time as excessive latency in loading the web page and slow display of embedding graphics, each of which can degrade the utility for that operator of using the World Wide Web.
One known method has been to provide programs which, having been given a set of web pages, download those web pages to local storage in a xe2x80x9cbatch modexe2x80x9d, for presentation by the web browser to the operator from the local storage. While this method provides for reduced latency in loading web pages, because they have already been downloaded before they are presented to the operator, it suffers from the drawback that the operator must specify which web pages are desired in advance. Thus, these methods sacrifice the interactive nature of the World Wide Web, which greatly reduces their usefulness.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a technique for loading web pages more quickly, while preserving the interactive nature of the World Wide Web. This advantage is achieved by a method and system according to the present invention in which pages are dynamically preloaded when links to those pages are accessed, so that latency and display time for those web pages is markedly decreased, while allowing the operator to dynamically select web pages for presentation.
The invention provides a method and system for dynamic preloading of web pages. In a system having a page server for transmitting pages upon request and a page client (or xe2x80x9cweb browserxe2x80x9d) for requesting pages and presenting those pages to an operator, the page client dynamically identifies links subsequent to the loaded page and preloads pages identified by those links for subsequent presentation to the operator, so that the preloaded pages are preloaded dynamically in response to operator selections and are available for presentation to the operator when ultimately selected.
In preferred embodiments, the page server and the page client may act independently or may cooperate so as to dynamically select and preload pages from the page server to the page client using parameters indicated by the page client (such as parameters selected by the operator or adaptively determined by the page client), parameters indicated by the page server (such as parameters selected by the page under presentation or adaptively determined by the page server), or parameters indicated by links to those subsequent pages, or responsive to a combination thereof.
In further preferred embodiments, the page client may dynamically save and recall behavior information about pages to be presented, such behavior information possibly being independent of actual links indicated on the pages. The behavior information may be responsive to parameters selected by the operator parameters adaptively determined by the page client, or responsive to a combination thereof.